Terror and the Postcolonial

Terror and the Postcolonial is a major comparative study of terrorism and its representations in colonial history and postcolonial theory, literature, and culture. Through a series of thematically-linked, original chapters, the volume critically analyzes the figuration of terrorism in a range of colonial and postcolonial literary texts from South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. It considers a variety of controversial political events such as the London shooting of Brazilian national Jean Charles de Menezes and the treatment of detainees at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. In doing so, this groundbreaking study questions, complicates, and, above all, historicizes the deep divisions between Western and non-Western cultures and their writings, and also their legacies of conquest, that underpin the contemporary rhetoric of terrorism. At the same time, the collection investigates the widely disparate value systems that are held to reinforce the recourse to terror in global literature and culture. With fine theoretical sophistication, Terror and the Postcolonial offers provocative new insights that will broaden our understanding of global terrorism today as well as of the cultural and literary responses to terrorism that have emerged throughout the postcolonial world.